Caddo

Most of it was about other creatures, but near the end he wrote a few paragraphs about water.

He said he'd heard secondhand that the Caddo people had once camped near a set of small spring-fed lakes north of Anadarko two hundred or more years back, and that they wouldn't let their women go for water without an armed man along because something in those lakes would snare a person and drag them down into caverns the springs had carved out of the sandstone.

He described it as about the size of a horse with several arms or tentacles, tiny eyes, reddish brown, leathery, and silent.

He compared it to a slug or a snail without a shell.

He said you couldn't get him to fish or swim in any of them for gold.

He never called it an octopus.

That's the earliest anybody has found the three lakes named together with the creature, and Bates was clear that he'd heard the Caddo story from someone else about a different people than his own from two centuries back.

Whether it's a genuine Caddo tradition or something that got attached to the Caddo along the way, nobody's been able to establish because nobody's found it documented anywhere before nineteen eighty-seven.